Along with the recent appearance of The Collected Poems of Lorenzo Thomas (2019), Wesleyan University Press’s publications of two selected volumes by Calvin C. Hernton (2023) and A. B. Spellman (2024) have done much to assist scholars working in the fields of contemporary literature and African American poetry and poetics. In each case, the editorial work of Lauri Scheyer and David Grundy, respectively, along with helping hands from Ishmael Reed and Spellman himself, provide reliable, annotated texts and biographical outlines for two poets whose work as part of influential collectives gathered under the banners of Umbra and the Black Arts Movement has long been out of print and difficult to find. Like Thomas—and Amiri Baraka, whose association with BAM is well known—Hernton and Spellman played pivotal roles in founding, developing, and disseminating the aesthetics and politics of these movements. Consequently, the publication of these career-spanning volumes helps to interrogate the scholarly tendency to associate this era of American poetry with the accomplishments of white writers. Indeed, despite Hernton and Spellman’s pioneering early publications that helpfully problematize whiteness, including Hernton’s long poem The Coming of Chronos to the House of Nightsong (1964), which stages a three-part epic in the voice of a Southern white woman named Eleanor Nightsong, and Spellman’s The Beautiful Days (1965), which performs an array of interracial couplings that blur both the social and juridical boundaries that seek to define racial categories; and even in spite of ample praise at the time from poets Frank O’Hara and Diane di Prima, among others, their poetry remains largely “undiscovered” by poetics scholars today.
Some of this has to do with the direction of their careers. Unlike Baraka and other, better-known peers, Hernton and Spellman followed itinerant paths as sociologists and poets. The trajectory of their research would steer them away from the spotlight of major publishers and endowed professorships as they spread the seeds of the Black Arts Movement to Georgia, Ohio, Washington, D.C., and even as far as the United Kingdom. As both scholars and poets, Hernton and Spellman remained faithful to the jazz aesthetic that informed their ongoing exploration of the midcentury’s poetics of breath and voice. Like their peers in the midcentury Black Mountain, Beat, and Black Arts Movements, they emphasized the performance of an improvised physicality capable of charting the body as though it were a reed instrument in a jazz combo. This approach is evident throughout their respective careers, whether pursuing interviews, case studies, or, of course, poetry. In each of these instances, Hernton and Spellman trusted in the spoken word to reveal a vital and emancipatory power as they rung changes on the era’s performative ethos.
Those changes are apparent in their attitude toward the period’s dominant approach to poetic voice. Unlike more mainstream, white practitioners of Beat aesthetics, who tended to approach poetic voice with a bardic sense of authenticity and self-presence, Hernton and Spellman troubled such associations by exploring the ambiguity and ephemerality of the spoken word, sketching parallels between their own careers as minor scholar-poets and the fugitivity inherent in vocal performance. The poetics of voice and breath animating their work followed parallel trajectories, blurring generic conventions and challenging racial boundaries while taking its orientation from the “Talking Book” tradition, slave narratives, and compositional concepts native to Black music.[1] The polyrhythmic waywardness apparent in both Hernton’s and Spellman’s work and the era’s jazz also recalls Aldon Lynn Nielsen’s delineation of the “future-anterior” of African American writing, an untimeliness that white writers at midcentury often understood as Black culture’s ability to appear simultaneously primitive and also avant-garde.[2] Picking up the thread here, I want to suggest that Spellman’s and Hernton’s approach to poetic voice reveals not simply one more example of the future-anterior’s paradoxical movement, but a minor aesthetic often occluded by the concept’s wavering, incessantly differential play. I see the belated interest evident in these career-spanning volumes as a response to these poets’ future-anteriority, to the way such untimeliness draws attention to an essential absence, to a presence absented at the time of their initial publication due to their shared pursuit of tellingly minor gestures. These gestures trouble any major, dominant understanding of the era’s commitment to a poetics of breath and voice that sought instead to reveal the fullness of the writer’s unitary, authentic self.
Critical theorists, of course, have framed the minor in a number of related and important ways, especially in terms of the concept’s ability to elucidate the power of vernacular responses to dominant conventions within a language community. In both Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature and A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari famously trouble the distinction between “minor” and “major,” arguing, in the latter, that they should not be understood as “different languages” but as “two usages or functions of language,” with the “minor” designating “a mobile paraphrase bearing witness to the unlocalized presence of an indirect discourse at the heart of every statement.”[3] As with Fred Moten, Stuart Hall, Erin Manning, and a host of others, Deleuze and Guattari equate the differential, “unlocalized presence” at the heart of the minor as akin to Blackness, writing, moreover, that studies of African American vernacular by linguists like William Labov witness a “becoming-minor of the major language,” the major in this case being white, so-called “standard,” English.[4] According to Deleuze and Guattari, “the strength of authors termed ‘minor,’ who are…the greatest, only greats” resides in their ability to “[u]se the minor language to send the major language racing.”[5] This instinct to restore a sense of ephemeral, liberatory movement, and to do so through paradoxical strategies that often seem inscrutable in their early-belatedness, describes well the minor aesthetics of Hernton’s and Spellman’s poetry, particularly their manner of inscrutability. As Moten has written, the minor as “minority” appears as the frightfully “un-self-governed” of enlightened, neoliberal political theory precisely because of its “nonperformance.”[6] Attuning these approaches to Hernton’s and Spellman’s poetry, I see their exploration of the fugitivity at the heart of midcentury poetry’s performative ethos as evincing instances of the future-anterior that appear stubbornly minor compared to the work of their better-known peers, and that, in so doing, pose similarly (un)timely questions for scholars today.
Readers familiar with Hernton’s and Spellman’s work as creative writers no doubt associate these concerns with their early poetry’s enthusiastic incorporation of themes and compositional techniques more commonly associated with Black music. Both poets established themselves as young members of New York’s integrated downtown scene, where many of the era’s most celebrated writers, artists, and musicians frequently collaborated and shared in the rich cross-pollination of aesthetic ideas. Hernton’s early poem “Jitterbugging in the Streets” recasts popular music as the soundtrack of mixed neighborhoods like New York’s Lower East Side, a “screaming ghetto” whose portrayal rebukes the racial inequities of postwar America “with venom on the tongue” (106, 107). Similarly, in “Did John’s Music Kill Him?,” Spellman frames the era’s racial politics as the “life” that “eats life,” and thus as an essential context to John Coltrane’s music (90). In fact, Coltrane serves as a paradigmatic example of such cross-pollination, his musical experiments in free and avant-garde jazz evident in the experimental writing that forms Black Arts Movement tributes from Spellman, Jayne Cortez, Sonia Sanchez, and others. Scholars like Sascha Feinstein have subsequently recognized these poems as instantiating their own genre, the “Coltrane poem.”[7] In this way, the Black Arts approach to the poetics of breath and voice cuts against the dominant tendency in café readings, Beat provocations, and even emergent rock culture to understand vocal performance as a one-dimensional demonstration of self-presence. It challenges such dominant, major assumptions through minor gestures like nonsense verse, improvisatory scatting, code-switching, onomatopoeia, using capitalization to suggest shouting, and, of course, structural concepts borrowed from avant-garde jazz. These techniques refuse any easy assumption of poetic voice as the disclosure of self-presence and, in so doing, witness another form of the minor, performative nonperformance outlined above. Of course, these gestures parallel those of better-known figures from the era; however, they do so in instructively minor ways, using the poetics of breath and voice to conjure vernacular forms that, in Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation, subvert the dominant language and the cultural conventions associated with its literature from within.[8]
In addition to foregrounding Hernton’s and Spellman’s contributions to experimental innovations in postwar poetics, these volumes track how the poets’ stylistic relationships to a minor aesthetic developed throughout their subsequent careers. As Grundy writes, “[i]n the following pages, you will encounter Hernton’s skill with the poetic line . . . his musical ear, lifting cadences from spirituals and hymns to jazz, blues, and R&B” (xiii). This focus runs throughout his introduction, itself fittingly titled, “‘This is my voice’: The Poetry of Calvin C. Hernton.” Ironically, the “my” is polyvocal throughout, inhabiting an array of interracial characters and addressing readers in a variety of registers, comprising, as Grundy notes, “philosophical reflection and…biting directness,” sometimes within the same phrasing (xiii). Similarly, Scheyer writes of Spellman that, as an undergraduate at Howard, he learned from the example of scholar-poets like Sterling Brown to form an aesthetic out of the materials found in African American folk culture, and particularly music, encouraging him to “incorporate Black popular music and references in his poetics” (xiii). As Scheyer’s selections reveal, Spellman has remained dedicated to this program throughout his writing life as a poet as well as a music critic.
Hernton’s “Jitterbugging in the Streets” nicely demonstrates this interest in collectivity. The poem takes its title from two modes of Black dance, both the well-recognized form of swing dancing popular across America in the 1930s and ’40s as well as, in Clarence Major’s insistently minor definition, “any kind of wild party dancing.”[9] Like Martha and the Vandellas 1964 hit “Dancing in the Street,” the poem figures Black dance as a metaphor for subversive protest. In doing so, however, Hernton’s poem registers its protest through the voice of repression. Written in the wake of Malcolm X’s assassination in February of 1965, the opening bitterly announces that there will be no savior to champion the struggle for freedom:
The only Messiah we shall see this year is a gunned-down man
staggering to and fro
through the wilderness of the screaming ghetto
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Talking to himself. (106)
Here, Hernton confronts a more established poetics of breath and voice with mumbled violence, as though the strident, hopeful, public voice of civil rights–era African American poetry suddenly pivoted into a realm of private lament for what the poem elsewhere terms “the rage of a hopeless people” (106). In this way, even Hernton’s earliest work critiques the dominant, major strand of midcentury poetics through a kind of parodic employment of it. Consider, for instance, the staggered, syncopated rhythm initiated by the second line quoted above. There, the indentation is typical of ’60s poetry inspired by Beat and Black Mountain examples of field poetics; of the page as both calligraphic canvas and, often simultaneously, visual score or chart for vocal performance. When combined with the shortened syllable count, such typography leaves the reader with an awkward, blank space to negotiate. This, in turn, is compounded by the disconcerting rhythm of “staggering to and fro,” where the first word’s dactylic enunciation staggers the line’s trochaic movement before finding its disoriented rhyme in “the screaming ghetto” of the next line. Such fugitive rhythms intentionally fail to capture both “the Messiah” “himself” and the speaker whose voice is clearly on the move, deferred or scattered, like the protesters it conjures. In these ways, Hernton’s music structures its own difficult dance with the violent repression of the civil rights movement. Rather than celebrate the dance craze that took over integrated nightclubs and represented the hopes for further interracial collaboration in the immediate aftermath of World War II, Hernton’s silenced speaker registers the shock of dancing through the apocalypse, employing a decidedly minor aesthetic to question the liberatory power claimed by better-known, major practitioners of the midcentury poetics of breath and voice, and the dominant form of politics that accompanied it.
Later, at Oberlin College in Ohio, where Hernton would become associate professor in the newly inaugurated African American Studies Department in 1972 and chair in 1997, he would find himself welcomed, paradoxically, as an exotic other. Though his style returns to more traditional lyric forms at this stage of his career, his concerns remain focused on the minor through an exploration of vernacular speech. Take, for instance, his short piece “Oberlin Negroes”:
Black people
In Oberlin Ohio
Still say
“Colored.”
The white people
Don’t know
What to say. (126-7)
In more ways than one, the poem turns on questions of saying, on how one ought to properly—correctly—pronounce racial difference. The poem centers around the nameless silence enveloping Oberlin’s white community when confronted by a Black man who, as an endowed chair in the college town, challenges established stereotypes by his mere presence. By juxtaposing the irony of Black preference for the antiquated “[c]olored”—itself a studied nonperformance of identity given the Jim Crow-era associations the term possesses—with the inexplicable, indeed unpronounceable, fact of Black success that causes otherwise well-meaning white people unease, Hernton reveals an unsettling impasse for the scholar-poet. Promoted on campus, he remained nonetheless invisible, even unspeakable, off of it. Such quandaries run throughout his post–Black Arts Movement work and so prod the reader to interrogate her own social relations and self-presentation.
For his part, Spellman left New York to continue the Black Arts Movement’s cultural ambitions elsewhere: first in Atlanta and then at the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, D.C. In Georgia, he met and married Karen Edmonds, the director of research for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, co-founding with her the Atlanta Center for Black Art on the model of Baraka’s original Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School in Harlem. After a brief stint teaching, he took up a post at the NEA running a program called Expansion Arts, which was designed to support institutions like the ACBA and BARTS by allocating funding for “arts organizations in inner cities and rural and tribal communities” (xvii). These excursions into community work and public service largely replaced poetry for nearly three decades in Spellman’s life. As Scheyer notes, a stipulation of his position at the NEA was that he could not accept publication offers or speaking engagements from nonprofit institutions during this time. Given the centrality of nonprofits in the ecology of the American poetry world, this effectively silenced him. As Spellman reflects, ‘“[it] basically means you can’t publish or give readings’” (xviii). Because of these sacrifices, he, like Hernton, appears now as a minor poet better known for most of his career as a public servant and music critic. Nevertheless, Spellman continued writing privately while also gaining a thorough understanding of the ways in which minor gestures produce the very conditions for major art, viewing his nonprofit work creatively by explaining that “‘[u]nderstanding how to build something on a blank page helps you understand how to build an organization’” (xvii).
When he returned to poetry in 2008, his work picked up where The Beautiful Days left off thematically, while his style developed new ways of syncopating dominant idioms. As he put it in “Groovin’ Low,” another poem that explores a minor, nonstandard approach to poetic voice as a form of jazz instrument, his tempo had changed:
don’t look for me in the fly
staccato splatter of the hot young horn
no, you’ll find me in the nuance
hanging out in inflection & slur. (19)
As opposed to the angular, percussive soundings of the later Coltrane, Spellman’s aesthetic here appears “cool” and patient, animated less by “Fire Music,” by the screams and wails of overblown saxophones and frenetic drumming, as often represented in Black Arts–era poetry, and inspired more by the subtle “nuance” of vernacular “inflection & slur.” The conversational syntax and largely end-stopped lines pose their own mellow rhythm. As opposed, then, to the “staccato splatter” of youth, the elder poet, working amidst the often nuanced and difficult-to-name aggressions that police nonprofit work in the neoliberal state, shows how a world of drama unfolds in every “inflection & slur.” The ampersand conjoins these two terms with a speed that recalls the slurring or bluing of notes on guitar strings or trombone slides, blurring the distinction between them just as Spellman’s diction leaves identity “hanging” in the liminal space between vernacular inflection and racial slur. Indeed, the “inflection” of Spellman’s later work, like that of his earliest collections, offers a counter to major form, one that cannot be clearly heard or completely understood in its leisurely nonperformance.
Both poets’ minor approaches to Black music and the materiality of voice, from the early 1960s to the present, exemplify the enduring complexity posed by New American and Black Arts interests in a mobile, embodied poetics. Readers are challenged, in Hernton’s words, to “[s]peak this because I exist”—to come to terms, in other words, with what Moten would call the fugitivity of embodied Blackness (4). While the careers of prominent Black poets like Baraka witness well-known attempts to navigate such paradoxes, Hernton and Spellman represent stubbornly minor alternatives. Such minorness, of course, courts obscurity, but obscurity’s darkness is neither invisible nor silent. Instead, as the examples of Hernton’s and Spellman’s long careers show, minor aesthetics only appear this way from the standpoint of dominant perspectives, ones that require such background figures to construct the hegemonic foreground upon which they stand. The (un)timely appearance of The Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton and Between the Night and Its Music should serve to shift the ground of post-1945 poetics debates, reorienting them along the lines of a “luxuriant withholding” of Black aesthetics, to borrow a phrase from Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons.[10] In fact, minor gestures such as these provide hopeful examples for moving through the precarity that confronts so many poets and scholars working today.
Notes:
[1] See Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Ashon Crawley, Black Pentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017); and my own Dissonant Voices: Race, Jazz, and Innovative Poetics in Mid-Century America (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2023).
[2] Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 124, 152.
[3] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 104.
[4] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 104–5. See also Moten’s work, noted above, as well as Stuart Hall, “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?” Social Justice 20, no. 1–2 (1992): 104–14; and Erin Manning, The Minor Gesture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).
[5] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 105.
[6] Fred Moten, The Universal Machine (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 114, 144–5; Stolen Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 246–48.
[7] See Sascha Feinstein, “From ‘Alabama’ to A Love Supreme: The Evolution of the John Coltrane Poem,” The Southern Review 32, no. 2 (1996): 315–27.
[8] See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 26–27.
[9] Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of American-American Slang, ed. Clarence Major (New York: Penguin, 1994), 259.
[10] Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 48.